LIFE IS BEAUTIFULLY BRUTAL
I hope that you enjoy this short extract from my upcoming book.
What would life be without all the big stuff like conception, childbirth, falling in love, heartbreak, taking our first steps, puberty, graduation, marriage, death and all the psychological, emotional and physical contractions that happen in between? I believe that these are the events that create enough force to make the earth’s tectonic plates shift.
It is commonly believed that the sperm that fertilises the egg was some super sperm that somehow was faster and stronger than any other, when really many other sperm swim just as fast if not faster only to be rejected, shut out, deemed unworthy, because the egg just won’t let them in. The sperm didn’t earn its place fare and square, it was just luck or not depending on how you look at it.
Forcing your way into this world after 9 months of comfortably feeding off of your host in order to develop enough to survive in this world when the time comes. Then you tear your way through your Mother’s body causing the most excruciating pain that should kill her if it didn’t take her to the very brink and yet every fibre in her being is compelled to love you.
So many processes we call nature have nothing to do with fare and normal and yet as humans we hold onto this perfect notion of what life should be like and everywhere we look it is obvious that perfection has nothing to do with life. So I can’t help but wonder if it is possible that our denial of the brutality that is a natural part of life is what causes the most suffering?
Most Queens were not first princesses, they were untitled, unrecognised and tolerated in the armour and they know little or nothing about being adored. Blazing through shadows they grew fangs and claws from turning feral in the dawn.
It was already getting dark when I approached the edge of the field, ready to cross the railway tracks to head back from where I came only an hour earlier. A boy had followed me asking for an explanation, because he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be his girlfriend after kissing another girl whilst we were together only months before.
I was focused on the conversation building and falling apart in the back of my mind as I imagined how I would ask Aunty Janup if I could live with her on a more permanent basis. I left her house at the very last minute always hesitant to leave and go back home after spending the weekends with her. Her house was warm and violence free, no drinking and no drugs. I could escape my life for a few days and going back was always hard.
When I arrived back at the house that we were staying at for only three months at the time, the sweet old lady opened the door “Your Mother is not here, she moved”. She looked exhausted as if she had aged an extra 10 years in the short time we were living there. It was obvious she wanted to help my Mother, because she felt sorry for us. I asked her if she knew where she had gone, but she didn’t. I didn’t expect that she would, because it was clear that my Mother didn’t move under calm circumstances.
I began walking to all her regular spots where I thought she may have been over the weekend. Most of them had no idea and made some suggestions for where I could look, to try and be helpful. Eventually I arrived at the house where the boy, who later followed me to the fields, parents lived and they told me where she was.
She was staying across the street from them at a house I didn’t know, a boy who was going into the house saw me standing outside and I asked him if she was there. He went into the house and a few minutes later she came out of the house looking the way she always did after a drunken binge weekend, carrying the air of depression, sadness, shame and victimhood. “You can’t stay here there is no place for you” She went back inside and left me with the question “what am I going to do?”
I left that boy standing on the field in the dark and walked back to Aunty Janup house feeling anxious and ashamed. I had nowhere to go, unwanted and alone in the dark. The streets were quiet and everyone was in their homes behind closed doors with the lights on. As I walked slowly back towards Aunt Janups house forcing myself to place one foot ahead of the other I imagined what it would be like to have a home.
Deciding so many things about my place in this world, who and what men are and about the world in those moments that I would spend many years circling back around to, in order to find peace. I wanted to disappear into thin air to be invisible, being in my body hurt. Her daughter didn’t want me to stay and told her mother to send me back, she was angry and didn’t see how I could be her mother’s problem.
She opened the door, called me inside and carried on as if I was always meant to be there. I was thirteen years old on that day, but my soul was already dying. She saved me, I learnt many things about people and life that day, I met a part of myself that I wasn’t ready for, but perhaps I would never have been ready to meet her if I had the choice.
So much of our human tendency is to seek comfort by avoiding our fear, we avoid the growing pains, the challenging things and spend years beating the drum of what is wrong thus keeping us right there in that place. The alcoholic parent and absent father, the addicted uncles and violent traumatised aunts, the poverty, homelessness and the shame.
I began running from that little girl ever since that day, because what chance would I have to be loved in a world where everyone sees perfect as normal and the ugly should be avoided at all cost, lest it be contagious. Only to run into her over and over again and what that little girl taught me was that life has nothing to do with normalcy, that life is in tune with nature and it is natural to find yourself initiated into awakening through brutal pangs and painful births.
That the Universe does not see helpless children, but ancient powerful souls with a mission, that some are called to more and evolution is raw, and that most queens were not first princesses in a castle, but warriors fierce and free even if not in the mind at first we will always get there eventually.
It begs the question:
“Does the expectation of fair and normal, sometimes keeps us in a state of resisting who we are meant to become?”